Pigeon vs broadband: who’ll win? There’s only one way to find out

Amazingly the story appeared everywhere from Metro, the BBC news site and even Newsnight. Cue quizzical raised eyebrow from Paxo as he was forced to read it out when he’d rather be talking about stolen elections in Afghanistan.

Still in case you missed it, Winston the pigeon had a memory card tied to his leg and was tasked with transporting it between two points 50 miles apart on behalf of a South African financial services firm. As our flighty friend took off, said company then sent a file via their internet connection to the same place.

You can guess what happened. Winston beat the email by a country mile, taking just two hours to arrive. Conversely, by the time he’d rocked up, just four per cent of the emailed data had reached its intended destination.

It's a brilliant story, with everything you want from a silly season news item. And it's justifiably made something of a star of Winston. But it also makes you realise that while the UK might be behind other nations in delivering faster broadband, compared with some regions of the world we don’t know how lucky we are.

uSwitch Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) under firm reference number 312850. You can check this on the Financial Services Register by visiting the FCA website.